Improvements To Tables, Library, Drafts, Activity Feed And More!

We launched Proposify version 1.7.0 today, and there’s so much that’s improved I almost don’t even know where to begin — but I’ll give it a shot.

This was definitely one of our biggest releases to-date. We made significant improvements to many areas of the app.

Table Flow

Many of our users were annoyed that tables wouldn’t automatically flow from page-to-page the way text does, so if they had a long pricing table they would need to create multiple tables on different pages.

What we did to accommodate this request was create a new type of page - a table page.

Here’s how it works:

When creating a new section, instead of having “text heavy” and “graphic heavy” like we had before (which let’s face it, made little sense), there is the option to turn on page flow, and add a fee table.

In other words:

If page flow is on and fee table is off, you will have a master text box that automatically flows from page-to-page (like Word).

If page flow is off and fee table is off, there will be no master text box and you will need to add your own text boxes which don’t flow from page-to-page (like Powerpoint). You can manually add/delete pages.

If page flow is on and you’ve added a fee table, it will add a master fee table that will automatically flow from page-to-page. And if you’ve added a fee table but turned page flow off, it will just add a fee table to the page and it won’t auto-flow, so you can manually add/delete pages.

This could still be improved. For example, you can’t drag a row from one page to another, so that’s something we’ll want to add to a future release. But this should make tables much more flexible and easier to work with.

Section Groups

Have your found your sections getting a bit difficult to manage? We now offer the ability to create “section groups”; kind of like folders.

This way, if you have a section called “Scope of Services” that is for design projects and one is for marketing projects, instead of needing to change the name of the section to something like “Scope Design” you can simply create a group called “Design” and put “Scope of Services” and any other design-related sections into the group.

To create the groups, click the create group button, give it a name and then it will automatically order the groups alphabetically.

You can still search and filter sections by tag within your library. You can then drag sections to reorder within a group or drag it to a new group. There always remains a default group that you can't rename or remove.

You can also delete sections much easier now by clicking the edit icon, and then you can check on sections and then click the delete button to remove multiple sections at once. Be careful with this power!

How it can be better

We are going to add the ability to rename sections from within the library in the next release. We had the functionality in place but there were some technical implications and we had to remove it at the last moment.

Version Renaming/Delete

Versions (formerly called “drafts”) are a way to rollback to previous versions of sections. We just added the ability to rename versions and delete unwanted/unused versions from your library.

Just click on the version you want to look at from the drop down within your library. Once you select the version, then you can click the edit icon to rename the section or the delete icon to remove that version. If the version is being used by another proposal it will warn you first.

Renaming Images

We now offer the ability to rename images in your image library so you aren’t stuck with the original file name. There’s a new menu when you click on an image in the library (or right click while viewing your images in the proposal editor). It allows you to rename, preview or delete the image.

How it can be better

We plan to eventually allow you to replace images in your library and even images right within your proposal layout.

Snapshot Activity Feed

We’ve updated our proposal snapshot view to be much better than before. Now the settings take up much less space to make room for the activity feed, which shows the entire timeline of your proposal, from when it was created, the last time it was edited, when your client viewed it, when it was marked as won, and any comments or internal notes appear on this page.

We fixed some bugs that made it show you the wrong notice, so now, for example, if your team member makes a proposal as lost, it will correctly say so instead of before where it said the client declined the proposal.

Landscape

We’ve finally worked out the kinks (at least we hope so) to allow for changing your page orientation to landscape. If you edit your theme, go to Page Template and change from portrait to landscape it will update accordingly. Keep in mind you will need to correct your layout and adjust page objects that may be outside of the page limits.

Opacity

You can now adjust the opacity on images, lines and shapes. If you right click and go to properties, you’ll now see an opacity field. If you lower it you’ll see your image or shape will become more transparent.

How it can be better

We’re going to change it to be a slider in a future release to make it a bit easier to adjust.

What's next

Another feature I haven't mentioned is Zapier integration. We are now in our private beta! Once our testers are done creating zaps, hooking up Proposify with their other tools, and giving us feedback on how to make it better, we'll be able to officially launch in the Zapier marketplace.

We've got other features and improvements on the horizon, most notably a native InfusionSoft integration, but for the next month or so our development team is going to take a break on new features to focus on bug fixes and other improvements related to the stability of our platform.

As always, I look forward to your feedback and suggestions and thank you for being a customer!